One point each for where, when, what and why. The prizes have no value.

Happy Christmas to all Cliscep Readers, who are encouraged to post their own puzzles below.

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10 Comments

  2. I agree with Philip. It was in London. It was the late 1940s. Why? It was free.

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  3. Those two answers sound better than my miserably sceptical one. I assumed it was wartime, people gathering fuel, and that it was an illustration of what happens when a nation’s energy system ceased to operate and is subject to rationing.

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  4. London

    Winter 2024

    Collecting fuel

    NetZero virtue signalling. Mayor Khan has banned gas boilers; London’s electricity supplies are overstretched & unreliable; those with Heat Pumps impose too great a demand on the electricity network and can’t afford winter daytime electricity prices; wood-burning stoves are their most reliable and affordable means for citizens to avoid becoming an ‘Excess Winter Mortality’ statistic.

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  6. SPOILER FOLLOWS

    Thank you all for the guesses. For the answer you have imagine Laurence Olivier’s voice saying something like “Berlin. November 1945.” It’s a frame from The World at War describing the aftermath, & is preceded by the tree being cut down. After that, the residents hurry forwards to saw off bits of the tree to use as fuel.

    When I re-watched the series a couple of years ago, this struck me as a stark warning of winters to come. But when I put the scene on again to collect the snip, I began to wonder whether the footage had been staged. Some of the people seem to be laughing about it. Gallows humour? And some of the women take to sawing at very bendy narrow twigs.

    Cynical old me. But the facts at face value are indeed that the residents of Berlin had no fuel and resorted to cutting down their fine avenue trees to burn.

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  7. OK forget the mistletoe, but this looks like a natural wind throw with the root stump still attached.
    Staged opportunity?- I’ll buy that, but Berlin in November 1945 looked like this.
    https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fmonovisions.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2015%2F06%2Fvintage-historic-photos-of-the-battle-of-berlin-1945-bw-22.jpg&f=1&nofb=1&ipt=490a8a4ca5ae2b9cd0eb50909ece5cec7f8009d301b7716532a06aa243b32f56&ipo=images

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  8. Burning live green wood is a particularly inefficient way of trying to keep warm. Putting a few cut branches in a basket and taking them home to put on the fire will probably release just enough useful heat energy to make up for the effort of collecting them! All very odd, especially as the Germans are renowned for their pragmatism and rationality.

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  9. People living close to Common land in England may have “commoners’ rights” attached to their property – such as the right to graze animals, to fish or to extract sand or clay. These rights often have archaic names – one such is ‘estovers’ the right to collect fallen timber for firewood. Note that it’s illegal to cut down trees on land you don’t own, but if one has fallen naturally you may be entitled to use it for firewood.

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  10. Here’s an easy Christmas/New Year quiz question: who said recently that the Bible supports modern environmentalist concerns about saving the planet and being nice to nature because the Bible says that angels first delivered the news about Jesus’s imminent arrival to shepherds, who, you know, are really big on nature and all that sort of thing? The angels didn’t deliver the news first to, you know, plumbers or heating engineers or petrol station attendants or people who lived in palaces or all that sort of thing.

    A hint: the speaker gives his sheep homoeopathic non-medicines because, you know, they’re really natural and all that sort of thing – so natural that the Jesus shepherds probably used them too (in that they probably didn’t use medicines either) .

    Another hint: he made me chuckle on Christmas Day when I should have been nodding sagely.

    Another: he’s famous for his faux humility – e.g., telling people that he doesn’t really know anything then boasting about all the clever people who listen to him (and getting angry when they don’t).

    Another: he has very big ears – bat-like things that he sometimes flaps so that he can fly around the world when he doesn’t feel like using private jets.

    Last one: you can buy a crude little model of him pooping for ~£15. Tempted. Google with ‘caganer’.

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